Keywords are the terms and phrases that your target market uses when searching the major search engines and directories for the products and services you sell. Your keywords are used in everything you do and are the key determining factor in how you rank in the search results among many of the major search engines.
A critical step in natural search engine optimization is to select the right keywords for your business, products, or services (including descriptive words), and your target market. Understand whom you are targeting and build your search engine optimization efforts around your audience.
You need to choose keyword phrases that are going to bring sustainable targeted traffic consisting of potential customers—not just anything and everything. What you may think is the perfect keyword phrase may not be used at all by your target market in their search queries, which is why it is so critical to research and validate your keywords.
Ideally, each page of your Web site is going to focus on a different set of keywords that are specific to the content at hand. If you were to focus on the same set of keywords on every page, then you would hit only one small portion of your market potential because you are only going to hit those same keywords over and over again—it is self-defeating.
First, you want to gather a master list of all possible keyword phrases. To make the data easier to manage, you can create different keyword list profiles that represent individual topics as opposed to trying to cover all topics in a giant master list. For example, if you have two product lines, you can create a keyword list for each. Naturally, some keywords are shared across the lists, but it is important to understand that the people looking for one topic (for instance, “jobs”) are not necessarily the same people looking for another topic (let’s say, “trucks”), and as such they are going to use different keyword combinations in their searches.
How do you create your master keyword list? Here are four solid techniques
for generating a list of potential keyword phrases:
1. Brainstorm, survey, and review promotional material.
2. Review competing and industry-leading Web sites.
3. Assess your Web site traffic logs.
4. Use keyword suggestion and evaluation tools.
Be sure to record the keywords you gather in a text document in your wordprocessing
program or in a spreadsheet. Including them in a spreadsheet or database makes them much easier to sort when it comes time to prioritize the keywords and weed out the junk.
As you work your way through the list of techniques, you want to cycle back to some of the techniques because you will come across search terms that can expand the scope of your original efforts and open the door to new, more targeted phrases that you might have missed the first time around.
